. Much rain in the hill country had swollen the swift waters of the
Cumberland and they fiercely clamored their devious way to the broad
Ohio. The gentle roar as the rippling wavelets dashed against the rock
bound shores sounded almost surf-life, but to Si, who had never
heard the salt waves play hide-and-go-seek on the pebbly beach, the
Cumberland's angry flood sang only songs of home on the Wabash. He had
seen the Wabash raging in flood time and had helped to yank many a head
of stock from its engulfing fury. He had seen the Ohio, too, when she
ran bank full with her arched center carrying the Spring floods
and hundreds of acres of good soil down to the continent-dividing
Mississippi, and on out to sea. His strong arms and stout muscles had
piloted many a boat-load of boys and girls through the Wabash eddies
and rapids during the Spring rise, and as he stood now, looking over the
vast width of this dreary waste of waters, a great wave of home-sickness
swept over him.

After all, Si was only a kid of a boy, like thousands of his comrades.'
True, he was past his majority a few months, but his environment from
youth to his enlistment had so sheltered him that he was a boy at heart.

"The like precurse of fierce events and prologue to the omen coming
on" had as yet made small impression upon him. Grim visaged war had
not frightened him much up to that time. He was to get his regenerating
baptism of blood at Murfreesboro a few weeks later. Just now Si Klegg was
simply a boy grown big, a little over fat, fond of mother's cooking,
mother's nice clean feather beds, mother's mothering, if the truth must
be told. He had never in his life before been three nights from under
the roof of the comfortable old house in which he was born. He had now
been wearing the blue uniform of the Union a little more than three
months, and had not felt mother's work-hardened hands smoothing his
rebellious hair or seen her face or heard a prayer like she could make
in all that three months.

"Shucks!" he said fretfully to himself as he looked back at the droning,
half asleep brigade camp, and then off to the north, across the boiling
yellow flood of waters that tumbled past the rocks far below him.

"A feller sure does git tired of doin' nothin'."

Lusty, young, and bred to an active life, Si, while he did not really
crave hustle and bustle, was yet wedded to "keeping things moving." He
had already forgotten the fierce suffering of his early m